Book Image

Drupal 6 Themes

By : Ric Shreves
Book Image

Drupal 6 Themes

By: Ric Shreves

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.<br /><br />Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system's front and back-end interfaces. <br /><br />Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 5 Themes, written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website<br /><br />Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system.</p>

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Drupal 6 Themes
Ric Shreves
Sep, 2008 | 312 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Drupal 6 Themes
Drupal 6 Themes
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The Elements of a Drupal Theme
The Elements of a Drupal Theme
The Importance of Themes in Drupal
What Is a Theme?
What Is a Theme Engine?
The Range and Flexibility of Drupal Themes
What You See on the Screen
The Big Picture: How Drupal Displays a Page
The Default Themes of the Drupal Distro
The Theme Files
Summary
2
Theme Setup and Configuration
Theme Setup and Configuration
Finding Additional Themes
Installing an Additional Theme
Configuring a Theme
Managing Modules and Blocks
Theming in Action: Dressing Up Garland
Uninstalling Themes
Summary
3
Working with Theme Engines
Working with Theme Engines
What is PHPTemplate?
How Does It Work?
Getting Started with PHPTemplate
Alternative Theme Engines
Installing Additional Theme Engines
Summary
4
Identifying Templates, Stylesheets, and Themable Functions
Identifying Templates, Stylesheets, and Themable Functions
Putting Together the Pieces—Templates, Stylesheets, and Functions
A Guide to Theming Elements
Summary
5
Intercepts and Overrides
Intercepts and Overrides
Overriding the Default CSS
Overriding Templates and Themable Functions
Summary
6
Modifying an Existing Theme
Modifying an Existing Theme
Setting Up the Workspace
Planning the Modifications
Creating a New Subtheme
Making the Transition from Zen to Tao
Summary
7
Building a New Theme
Building a New Theme
Planning the Build
Creating a New PHPTemplate Theme
Build a New Pure PHP Theme
Summary
8
Dynamic Theming
Dynamic Theming
Using Multiple Templates
Dynamically Theming Page Elements
Creating Dynamic CSS Styling
Working with Template Variables
Summary
9
Dealing with Forms
Dealing with Forms
How Forms Work in Drupal
How to Approach Modifying Forms
Solutions to Common Form Issues
The Default Forms
Summary
Drupal CSS Map
Drupal CSS Map
A Guide to Drupal Stylesheets
The Stylesheets of the Default Themes
The Themers' Toolkit
The Themers' Toolkit
Drupal Modules
Firefox Extensions

Chapter 3. Working with Theme Engines

In this chapter, we will explore theme engines in general and Drupal's default PHPTemplate theme engine in detail.

Our exploration of the PHPTemplate engine lays an important foundation for understanding how to create themes or how to extensively modify existing themes. In the examples below, we show:

  • The key files used in the theming process

  • How these files impact themes

  • The order of precedence among theme files

  • The availability of alternatives to the PHPTemplate engine

Though you don't need to be fluent in PHP to understand this chapter fully, a little familiarity with the programming language will certainly make things easier. The code examples in this chapter come from the default themes Bluemarine and Garland, contained in the Drupal distribution.

What is PHPTemplate?

PHPTemplate is one of a family of applications known as theme engines (referred to often elsewhere as "template engines"). These applications serve a middleware function and determine the...

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